The film adaptation of I, Robot is significantly different from the book. The greatest difference is the brevity of the film. There is much plot that has been removed.
In the book, the three laws are the basis of the plot. Nearly every short story revolves around the working of the three laws. However, the film really only deals with the first law, restating it many times but not really dealing with the nuances that the law and its subsequent laws pose. The most intriguing part of the novel was the interworking of the three laws, and the unintended consequences that the laws posed on humanity. I would have liked to see more of this in the movie. Perhaps by the end of the film, the other two laws will play a bigger role.
It will be interesting to see if the film ends in the saw manner as the novel. In the book, the robots took over humanity without the knowledge of humans. This far in the film, it appears that humans are in control. We are only concerned with one robot who seems to have feelings and human morals. Perhaps VIKI is the all-knowing robot from the novel, and she is more powerful than we have yet seen. It might be that everything that has happened this far has been designed by her. If the book is to stay more or less true to the novel, this could end up being the case. It will be interesting to see how the film will compare to the novel in the end.
Your predictions about VIKI ending up manipulating the first law to include humanity rather than individual people turned out to be spot on. I think that the end of the film were what really connected the film to Asimov's novel. In the final story, we see that robots had ended up taking control of all aspects of human government in order to protect humankind from themselves. The end of the film revealed that VIKI's perfect logic led her to the same conclusion, but VIKI tried to use the NS-5 robots to take control immediately and by force rather than gradually like in the novel. VIKI's plan did not work because the violent robot attempt at takeover was resisted, which seems to be a flaw in her logic that only happened in the film for cinematic purposes.
ReplyDeleteYour prediction about VIKI was impressive and very accurate. After seeing the movie and reading the book I think that the story really puts our society into perspective and changed the way I view the technological we see today and will continue to see even more of in the future. I fear that we may become too reliant on the machines we create and we will end up creating the very object that leads to our destruction, but at the same time I'm beginning to understand the futility of trying to stop it from happening. Man is more than capable of destroying himself, but whether this happens more like it does in the movie with a quickly progressing revolution, or whether this happens like in the novel where mankind unknowingly relinquishes control will continue to be a daunting mystery to me
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your statement about the disregard for the other laws. As the movie progresses it becomes clear that although the first law is the most prominent one, the other two also play an important role. VIKI's desire to save humans from themselves could also be construed as her attempting to make sure robots play a vital role in the future of humanity. This could be perceived as the third law coming into effect since the robots must preserve themselves. Also at the very end of the movie, Sunny admits that he killed Dr. Lanning so as not to break the second law. Dr. Lanning must have been very stern when making Sunny agree to kill him otherwise it would not have been enough to overcome the first law. I think that in general however, the gray areas between the laws that we saw in the novel was reflected well in the movie.
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